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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Purgatorio: The Earthly Paradise (Cantos 28-31) with Dr. Michael West
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- [00:00]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Today on a San the Great Books podcast we are discussing Cantos 28 through 31 of Dante's Purgatorio, the earthly paradise. This was by far one of my favorite sections. The first time I read the Purgatorio it just, it gets a little bit chaotic. You don't know exactly what's going on. It reminded me a lot of Dante's Inferno and the kind of imagery that he uses there. It's a deeply poetic, deeply allegorical section. Again, just one of my favorites. And we have a first time guest to guide us through this. Today we have Dr. Michael west from the University of Dallas and he does an absolutely excellent job. I appreciated him coming on the podcast, very humbled that he would spend his time with us and greatly appreciated his insights. And I've appreciated all of you as well. I appreciate everyone who has joined us for this Lenten reading. I appreciate everyone who's joining us to read the Purgatorio. It's been a very fruitful read. I hope it's been very beneficial for you in your Lenten journey as we try to remake the image of Christ in us. We try and become more beautiful as Christ is beautiful. And I hope you enjoy our conversation today as well over Cantos 2831 of Dante's Purgatorio, discussing the Earthly paradise with Dr. Michael West. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Hurston Garlic. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. We've read the Iliad, the Odyssey, many of the Greek plays and several of the Platonic dialogues. With a reread of Homer's Odyssey this summer and before the movie and then Plato's Republic on the docket for later in 2026. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters. They have access to written guides to the great books and also to community chats where you can chit chat with people who are reading the same great books you are. Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule. Also, thank you to the center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College and Dr. Jason Baxter for promoting our read of Dante's Purgatorio this Lent. And go check out Dr. Baxter's new translation, which is the one that I've been using on our Read through this Lent. All right, today, finally, we're at the top of Mount Purgatory. We are covering Cantos 28 through 31, introducing the Earthly paradise, and also Beatrice. Finally, after a whole canticle, two whole canticles almost, we finally get Beatrice. To help guide us through these texts, we have Dr. Michael west, who serves as an assistant professor of English at the University of Dallas. Dr. West, welcome to the podcast.
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Dr. Michael West
Thank you. Happy to be here.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah. So just tell us a little bit about, like, your own scholarship.
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Dr. Michael West
I am a Shakespearean, which is to say I've written articles, finishing a book on Shakespeare, early modern drama. This. It's perfect. Some ways really perfect for these Cantos, because one thing I'm really interested in is the way that art and literature can confuse us and puzzle us. Um, much like that, you know, 1029 of Purgatorio, where there's all these sort of symbolic seeming things that we don't quite know what they mean. I'm interested in that. I'm also really interested in just. I'll say the. The we might call the limits of general rules for guiding human life, and in particular, what that implies about education. You know, we. We teach people things, but what do we teach them that will help them live well? And how do we help move from the kinds of things we do in classes, like reading these great books and, you know, cultivating the virt, living well as adults. That's a. Something I'm trying to write about, but I also just think about every day in the classroom at the University of Dallas.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Wonderful. What's your favorite Shakespearean play?
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Dr. Michael West
King Lear.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Okay, sorry.
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Dr. Michael West
Not to be like a downer, but, you know, that is my favorite.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
No, that works.
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Dr. Michael West
My second. How my favorite comedy. It's as you like it. Love. It's just so much fun. I. You'll never get tired of it.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
No. That's wonderful. So what's your fondness for Dante then?
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Dr. Michael West
Well, I think that. So our students here at University of Dallas read it every spring with us. The freshmen do. And so I guess there's sort of a few things that I've come to love about Dante over the years. So one is, I think, the Purgatorio. You know, for most students at the University of Dallas, if they had to pick a favorite, I think it's usually Purgatorio, and there's one they really connect with. Maybe I think it's because purgatorial is about us. It's about people whose will is maybe mostly oriented in the right direction, but who kind of still feel, you know, like a drag on that. Like something is, is, is holding us back and it's probably ourselves. The feeling that we're weak. The feeling that we want to want God more than we actually do. I mean, all of those things seem to me what Purgatorio is about. I've always loved that. I also love the way Dante's kind of a mess. I think he's really easy to criticize as this sort of arrogant guy who thinks he's really important, thinks he's a great poet. And one of the things I just love is the way that Dante knows that better than us. He says back in, I think it's 12 of purgatory or something. Like, oh yeah, I'll definitely be back to this terrace, the terrace of the prideful. I'm going to spend a lot of time here later. So he, he knows that about himself. And so it's, it's, it's kind of endearing when someone is very aware of their, of their faults. I think the last one is. I think Dante is. People think of him sometimes self centered, you know, like it's all about Dante and his story. And, and there's a, there's a truth to that. He's a confident guy. But I also just love the way that Dante is. I think of him as all about, he's all about community. He's all about. He thinks there's nothing more important than our lives together. He thinks that being alone is bad and being in community is good. You know, he thinks that sin makes you alone and he thinks that, you know, it, it inhibits the formation of trust in the community. And when we live well, it means that we're living more with other people and we're, we're sharing those common goods that they talk about in, earlier in Purgatorio. So even in, even in things like heaven, people are always doing things together. We start to get dancing in this section, which I love. So I think that he's a, he's a, he's a great poet for people who are sort of striving, you know, have a kind of sense of spiritual striving for themselves, but also tempers that impulse that some of us might have to, to make it all about ourselves and to think that, you know, it's my job to get me to heaven or something. And it's. Dante doesn't seem to think about heaven and the moral life in that way at all. And I think he's a, those are things that I have certainly Learned from him and reading him over the years.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, I actually think that's a really subtle motif in Dante is the community and the communal. We saw that when we read through the inferno. Dr. Prudlo at the University of Tulsa helped us kind of see that it might be the communal side that helps understand some of the odd ordering of the punishments of hell. Because you're like, wait, how is this sin worse than this one? Because sometimes you'll have like a sin against like something natural that's lower than a sin against something like of the Church. Right. So doesn't grace perfect nature? Shouldn't the violation of the higher be a lower punishment? But if you look at them, I think one working theory is that he's very sensitive to degradations against the community. And so some of these sins then, particularly against natural, the nature, the foundation of the supernatural, that then harm everyone around you, they actually are a deprivation of the common good, actually are worse sins for Dante. And so that's. I like you pointing that out because I think it's something that is really subtle in him that we have to have to kind of track. And like, one thing I want to go back and spend more time on is when Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson was on just a few weeks ago, we looked at the canto that's right in the middle of the entire comedy, just here in the Purgatorio. And it's in that one that he talks about living together, about what it means for the two powers, the temporal and the spiritual, to come together and actually govern man and his pilgrimage on Earth. Like that's his middle canto to the entire comedy. And there's just. Yeah, I'd like to go back and think about that more.
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Dr. Michael West
You can also one question that people sometimes have is why in circle 8 and hell does he spend so long in circle A? There's almost half the Inferno is in there. And I think that what you're talking about helps to explain that. He's talking about fraud. He's talking about the ways that we, when we cheat others, it lowers the level of trust in the community as a whole. And that's part of the damage that it does. It's not just an individual one on one thing. It's that all of a sudden we all have reason to suspect each other. Um, and if you've ever been a part of a group where that happens, it's a kind of horrible feeling. People feel alone and like they can't really talk. And I mean, to me that's. That's part of what's beautiful and why he's just so hard on it in a way that I think strikes that, you know, we're sort of like, you know, fraudulent. Like email scams. Is that really that bad? But I don't think he's not quite thinking about that. He's thinking about fraud. As in, like, among people who you live with.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah. You see that with the falsifiers, the alchemists. Right. It's one of the things, like, why are the poor alchemists so far down here in Hell? Right. My example I gave earlier was. Yeah. That the grafters, those who sell temporal offices, are in a lower section of hell than those who are guilty of simony. You're like, what's going on? So, no, I think the communal is a really good thing to watch as we move through with Dante. Do you guys. So you guys read the Purgatorio with your students at the University of Dallas?
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Dr. Michael West
We read the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Everybody reads that in the second semester of freshman year, along with Milton's Paradise Lost and Lyric Poetry. So this is just what we do here. It's in the air right now. There's 430 students walking around with copies of Dante and trying to come to terms with it together. It's great.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
No, it's wonderful. And you must have. You must have much better students than I was as a young man, because it took me a little bit while much longer to appreciate the Purgatorio. The Inferno captured my imagination. The Purgatorio didn't really make a lot of sense to me until I actually really wanted to sanctify myself, to purify myself, to actually be very intentional about my walk with Christ. Then this became like, a fantastic guidebook. Right. It's like, oh, this is how you do it. It's difficult. But this is like a wonderful kind of playbook of how the soul can actually ascend to God. So. No. Very good. Okay.
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
One.
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Dr. Michael West
One thing I'll add is. I mean, you can. There are ways. I think. I think it is about that. But I have been struck by how much things like exercise and, like, weightlifting are ways to understand the Purgatorio. That, like, why is it, for example, that it gets easier? Easier? As you climb higher, shouldn't it get harder? But if you think about just any sort of, like, exercise thing, like, when you start, it's really, really hard. It's the worst. It's the hardest. But actually, once you get going, then you really start to pick up, and then your. Your strength, you know, builds on itself. Also the idea that we kind of have vague aspirations to do things on one level. You know, we like to get better grades or, you know, we. We like to get up early or all these things, but. But we don't really actually do what it takes to get there, um, even at the sort of lower goods that we pursue in life. Often the Purgatorio has that structure where it's thinking about what are the things that you sort of know are good and. And you would never deny, but on some level, your will is just pretty weak in actually pursuing it. And the Purgatorio is about how is it that the will can actually start to go for that thing.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, very well said. Yeah. There's certainly analogs between spiritual excellence and physical excellence and kind of the how one matures in both. I think you can tell a lot of parallels. Okay, let's look at canto 28 of the Purgatorio. So this is great. I feel like we finally. Right. We've kind of summited the mountaintop. Everything that we've been looking forward is here. And I remember the first time I read this, this is the section that really impacted me the most, because, again, when I first read it, I didn't have a great appreciation for the Purgatorio. So I found, like, the terraces, like, you know, they have a liturgy, they have a pattern. I really liked Inferno, where I'm like, man, I have no idea what's going to happen next. Like, I know vaguely we're going down in the circles, but you never know. It's like you said, we might spend half a canto in a circle, and then we're gonna spend, you know, half the book in another circle. And there's, like, people come out and weird punishments and all kinds of things. And so when we got to the Purgatorio, it was, like, very structured, moving up. And as a young man, I was like, ugh. I would like something a little bit more. Just like, I kind of, you know, I want that feeling of, like, I don't know what's going on. Like, what is this? That's what I felt when I find. The first time I read this when I got to the earthly paradise where I'm like, wait, what is happening right now? Who is this woman that's just like, who's Matilda? Like, where does she come from and what does she do and what garden is he in then? And then we'll get there. But, like, in when Beatrice shows up, that Completely sideswiped me because that was not what I was expecting, how that relationship goes. So let's look at the beginning of 28. So here we have. He is here. He's up. And we have this earthly paradise up at the top of Mount Purgatory. He's still with Virgil, he's still with Statius. This kind of section that we have here at the beginning is interesting because Musa has a comment that this is one of the most famous descriptions of, like, a forest of the woods in the Western canon. It's known for that, which I thought, you know, from not being terribly familiar with a lot of the literature there, I thought that was really interesting. And then we get this lady who's, like, picking flowers. Where should. Where should we start here in Canto 28 to understand what's going on.
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah, One. One thought is that it's. It's a forest and it's. There's nothing sinister about this forest, and there's a lot of forests that are kind of sinister. I don't know. I have. I have four kids. I read a lot of children's books, and forests are usually like, a little bit hostile or potentially hostile. And this. What's wonderful about this is there's, like, no sense that anything bad could ever happen here. So I think he's. He's kind of reversing that expectation that, like, hey, everything is great. This is exactly what you want a forest to be. I also think I'm interested in the flowers that she gets. So for me, it's line 69, where she's holding the flowers. And in my translation, it's that the flowers grow unplanted on the high terrain. I don't know what you have in yours, but there's an idea that the. Yeah, what do you have?
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
It says, which sprout without seed within that lofty land.
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah, so there's. There's like. It's like the. There's no cultivation here, so no one is taking care of this garden. But also they. They. They have no seed because all seeds come from here is what. Is what he says later. So I think the. The image that this is a beautiful natural space that has essentially, like. Not that humans don't do anything here, as it's just like one more sign of the deep purity and innocence of this place. The woman is lovely and she's singing, and there's. There's sort of interesting commentaries on this at this moment. So, like, around line 50, he talks about Proserpina, and he says, yeah, you're you're just like Proserpina right before her mother lost her. And then there's the line about Venus at line 65. So that's the second comparison. And then there's the line about hero and Leander at 70, like around 73. And so there's this question about, like, why is he bringing up all these stories of essentially, like erotic stories that end in disaster? And I'm kind of persuaded by the idea that there's. We're supposed to read this as like potentially, like kind of a. This is. This is a sort of potentially erotic encounter that doesn't get consummated because there's something pure and beautiful here, but sort of like our dirty minds can't have a hard time hearing it that way, because that's what Eden would mean, is that you could just have this kind of encounter and there would be nothing untoward about sort of you and a lovely young maiden chit chatting over a. A stream about flowers.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Okay, good. I'm glad you brought this up, because no, I. I think these Cantos are actually deeply erotic in the kind of like more traditional or rich sense of that term of your Eros. Your natural love has a desire to satiate. It's a need love. It has a desire to satiate on beauty. And even if you go back to Symposium, Plato's Symposium, and the Ladder of love, right, you have three parts of your soul, and so you have the appetitive at the bottom, and that seeks the beauty of pleasure. You have the spirited thermonic and that seeks the beauty of nobility, excellence, et cetera. And then you have the intellect which seeks truth. And then above that, there's this kind of mystical satiation in the divine beauty itself, which in later Christianity will pick up these themes. And we see God as beauty itself. And we see very clearly then that, oh, your Eros, your erotic appetite for beauty is actually enkindled in you by God because it's an infinite desire. Like we never. Like when you satiate in beauty, you're happy and you want to be happy all the time. You're never sitting around being like, I wish I wasn't happy right now. You want to be happy, which means that your appetite for this is infinite, but all the beauties around you are finite. And so this is like the first. Like even Plato saw this, this is the first inkling that your Eros, your love, your erotic appetite, is actually designed for some type of infinite beauty. It doesn't actually rest until it satiates in God. And so I really, Like, I'm interested in what you said there about, you know, the lady. We find out, her name is Matilda. She's. She's here she is down at, like, line 40, a lady, quiet, alone, who walked along while singing and picking flower after flower. So she kind of. She also has. We just saw Leia from, you know, and she was, you know, picking flowers as well. So there's this kind of motif of, like the active life of. She's out here, she's doing something, but she's taking something natural, she's creating something beautiful out of it. And so, no, she's a mysterious character. I mean, we should say that she's a mysterious character just as far as the comedy goes. Very general.
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Dr. Michael West
Yes.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Because who we're expecting is Beatrice. That's who we're expecting. And then we get this other woman, and I think then we're trying to figure out what is she an analog of. So it's like Dante, the pilgrim is an analog of humanity. And Virgil, who's still there with him, and Statius is there too. So Virgil's like our human reason. And Beatrice is going to be, you know, grace, revelation, divine wisdom. Who is this woman that is just like, picking flowers.
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Dr. Michael West
There's. I mean, so Beatrice is going to talk with him about. With Dante about Eros and love and desire for beauty in 30 and 31. I guess I hear her this as sort of like the Matilda, sort of the beginning of that. So this is sort of about your attraction to the beautiful, independent of the beloved. You know, sort of like the specific Beatrice who has been in your mind since you were 9 years old, or whatever it is. There's this sort of like, intermediary version of that. It's interesting that we. We call her Matilda, but, like, we don't know that that's her name here. It somehow seems fitting that she hasn't. She doesn't really have a ton of personality. I think of her as sort of wonderful and beautiful and attractive, but sort of like all she needs to do is attract him. And that's sort of her function at this point is to sort of carry him. Carry him along. She's someone who. I guess. I don't know if y' all have read the medieval by the Gawain poet, the Pearl poem. But the Pearl poem is a poem about a man and talking to a woman, a beautiful young woman across the stream. Now, that woman happens to be his daughter, but it's. There's this sort of trope of like, men talking to beautiful young women. Across rivers in a lot of medieval poems. And so it's a. It's. I don't. It's something that's original to Dante. It's something that gets brought up a lot. But I do think the image of the river has something to do with, you know, our sense that we long for something that we don't yet possess. I think that's partly what's at stake. That's why she has to be on the other side and not on his side of the river. I'm kind of satisfied with her being associated with a bunch of different things as opposed to meaning one thing. I think it actually makes her more interesting that she can, because eventually she's going to, like, drown him and, you know, in the river Lethe in 31, which is very different than what she's doing now.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, no, it's really fascinating. I mean, another motif here with her, which we're also see with Beatrice, is her eyes. So he has this whole description. And then it's not till 63, she gave a gift to me and lifted up her eyes. I can't believe that. Such a light irradiated once under Venus's brow. And then he goes on to discuss these and et cetera. So eyes is a theme. We're going to see that as we get into these Cantos as well. But what is this? So I guess before we get into what is the river? And I think that's fascinating that you mentioned the Pearl. We have done Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on the podcast. We did it as our Christmas and New Year's read. Dr. Justin Jackson came on from Hillsdale to help us, and he was. You just wind him up and let him go. He's fantastic. But I. I love the Pearl because I. It's in the Tolkien edition, and so I read it. And so I also. I read it not knowing anything about it. I was like, oh, I'll read this. I loved Sir Gallen. I'll read this poem. So I read the Pearl. Should mention that my eldest is a girl and that that poem destroyed me. Like, just wore me apart. So I do want to cover it on the podcast one day, but I had not made that connection. And that's interesting because the Pearl, poetry we know, knows the comedy, so that's an interesting parallel there. But where are they? Okay, so they're in this, like, this forest. Is this Eden? What is this that they're in?
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah. So she. I guess around 95, she gets explicit and kind of. Kind of clarifies Things. Can you. Can you read yours there?
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Around 94, he says, she says, and through his fault, I think the. Let's see this says, and through his fault he dwelt here briefly. And through his fault. Yeah, he being Adam.
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
He traded honest laughter and Jocund's sweetness for grief and lamentation.
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
So this is Eden, right?
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah, this is. This is Eden. People sometimes call it the earthly paradise. And I guess it's helpful to kind of remember the architecture of purgatory here. So she says that at like 1 0, around 100, that the mountain rose just high enough toward heaven to tower free of it above the bolted gate. Um, and then that's where. And then all the seeds, like, sort of are blown from the top of this mountain around the world, is what she says. I do think it's interesting that this used to be on the earth's surface. Like when. When Adam and Eve were here, it wasn't the top of a mountain. That seems really important because, of course, Satan fell from heaven in Dante's story and then like crash lands into the earth and creates Inferno and then pushes up the land on the other side, which is how you get Mount Purgatory. So they are clearly on Earth, but they are sort of as. It's unearthly, a sort of part of Earth as you could possibly get. It's like the. You know, it's. It's the highest you could ever get.
- [23:52]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, we see that up at another part where she mentions this explicitly is up by 78, it seems. You're new. And while I'm smiling, she then began within this place once chosen as the nest for human nature. So this is really interesting. I mean, there's a few things I think that are fascinating there. One, I wonder if Dante sees Eden as being the Garden of Eden, as being a mountain originally. So it's. It's certainly where it seems. What he's saying is that it's here and then it gets pushed up out of the realm of man, which is kind of fascinating because you could. You can make a good argument that the Garden of Eden is on top of a mountain because it has four rivers running from it. You can't have four rivers running multiple directions if it's not on a mountain.
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Dr. Michael West
So it'd be interesting to see.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, it has to be, like elevated, like to some degree. So that's an interesting parallel there. I didn't thought about that. But then, two, I think it's maybe just taking a step back and you talked about, like the structure of Mount Purgatory. So this is interesting. You think at the top of purgatory is going to be heaven?
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
So we've climbed and now we're just back to Eden. So this is like an interesting dichotomy of what is it? What like when, for example, when Dante actually gets crowned by Virgil, he gets his crown in his miter, he's sovereign over himself, and he can enter into paradise. What is it that Dante the poet is trying to teach us about kind of the purification of man as he's come up to this point?
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Dr. Michael West
I mean, I hear that as well, you're high, but you're only so high. There's a lot more that maybe God has in store for you, but you're not capable of it yet, or you're not certainly not capable of it by yourself. One thing I noticed is that so much of Purgatory, there's very little about sort of like illogical virtue there. There's just a lot about like natural virtue, it seems to me. And so there's this sense that like, this is kind of maybe what human beings are capable of, which is to get to the top of this mountain. I love the. I mean, to me, it was. I guess I remember being. When I. I think the first time I read this, I just thought they went up some mountain and then they made it to heaven. I sort of didn't notice this because we're not really in purgatory, but we're not in heaven. So it's one of these in between places which I think are really interesting. And I remember when I. When I realized, oh, that's Eden, that it's clear that people often say, like, well, you know, Eden was great. We want to get back to Eden, or so and so wants to get back to Eden. And it's clear for Dante, he doesn't want to get back to Eden. He's like, no, no, no. Eden's just some like, waystation onto like much cooler stuff. And it. That's sort of like made physical or literalized here in this story that like they. Yet they have to stop here for a little bit, but they're gonna. They're gonna keep going. We have a lot more commedia to go. I do think that's like a. Like a sort of. There's something deep about Christian vision of life. I think that sort of we're not built for this world or even we are made for this world in some sense. God's plan is. Is not for us to simply be the best version of ourselves in this world, he has this. There's this whole other domain that we have a very hard time imagining that Dante's going to try to imagine. And that's partly why Eden, which is sort of peak human, you know, location, is sort of a kind of a way station where we're just going to bop for a few cantos before we move on to the next thing.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, well said. I think two things come to mind. One is the fact that grace has a double effect. So grace does perfect our nature. It elevates it. Right? It is supranatural. It's something above our nature, but people forget that it also heals our nature. So grace has this double effect of coming in and healing the nature and then elevating it to something more. So in a certain way, you can see that as the purgatory is that the purging of sin and the attachment to sin is a healing of the nature. And it's only really until you come back to the earthly paradise that you've really come back to, like, square one. And now you can be elevated, if that makes sense. I think, too, the other thing that comes to mind is some of this depends on the theology, your theology of the Incarnation, which Dante follows Aquinas here, which is a little bit different. But the idea is, is that following Augustine, that the, you know, oh, happy fault, Felix Kulpa, that the fall of Adam and Eve created something happy for mankind. Well, that's not really true if we're just trying to get back to the garden. But what we realize is that the Incarnation and the passion of our Lord elevates humanity to something that it wasn't previously. So even though Adam and Eve are in the garden, are with God, they're graced here with Christ. We actually become one with the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. We actually become united to the Godhead through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. It's something greater than even what the garden had. So I think that's another way to see it, is that there's a healing, a purging of the nature. It gets back to Eden, but that's not our final end. That's not where we're trying to get back to now. He'll be able to ascend and move up and go into the beatific vision, something that is only available to us through the Incarnation.
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Dr. Michael West
Okay, so good. It's so good.
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Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, it's wonderful. This is why I love Dante, because he's like having a whole library, right? It's just like this whole thing where you have to read. Okay, but there are. There are two rivers here, correct?
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Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
- [29:07]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
So this. Help us understand this a little bit. So this is down at. I think it starts around 121, where she's starting now to describe the river one is the one you've already mentioned, the Lethe. Now that is from. That's from Greek mythology, correct?
- [29:23]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah. So Lethe is so in. In mine, it's at 130 that he names them or she names them.
- [29:30]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Right.
- [29:31]
Dr. Michael West
And at 1:127, she says on this side it descends and has the power to take from men the memory of sin. And so that's. That's Lethe. And that's in like Virgil and like everyone knows about Lethe. It's all in, you know, all the classical texts. And then Dante seems to have. Seems to have invented another river. The other one, he says on the other. It restores that of good deeds. And it's called, you know, a. My Greek is not great, but it. Something means something like good mind, you know, a. And to me, I think this is just. This is such a deep idea that's hard to get a handle on. But he, He. You don't have to forget. So in like a lot of the. The sort of Greek and Roman stories, you have to forget, you have to go through Lethe because you're going to be reincarnated somehow, basically. That's like often what. Why you need that. And that explains why even though we're all reincarnated, we don't remember our past lives. And Dante transforms it basically into like. Well, what would it mean to be truly. To have like, the mind of God or something? Truly. To be like, truly united to God on some level. He says you actually have to forget your sin, which I think is a really interesting idea, which I think we have most well. I certainly have a very hard. I'm gonna handle on that. I think of like Augustine's Confessions, where it's clear that that story only has the power it does because he remembers his sin. That.
- [31:01]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Right.
- [31:03]
Dr. Michael West
There's something about that memory that has shaped him into the person who he is. And to. To lose that feels like you would sort of wouldn't have, you know, you wouldn't have the power of that conversion story. But I think for Dante, you can have that in human life. But something about the sort of beatific vision or the life with God means on some level you don't remember your sin. But then he says there's this other river, which is basically the remembering river. And he says, and that's for you. You remember all your good deeds, that you have those. And when we go to heaven, it'll be interesting question because people will. Some people will talk about their lives, and it'll be an interesting question about whether they actually have forgotten everything or if they do remember things that seem like not great things. And what are the implications of that? That'll be a question for some people when you get there. This is something to me, I think he's trying to think about, like, what. What would it be to be sort of healed in your. In your mind? And I think for Dante, there has to be a kind of forgetting. That's. That's the implication of this, is that we can't carry around our sins with us. And in fact, part of forgiveness is that not only that, you know, the Lord forgets them, but we forget them in some sense. I don't know if this is, like. Especially if, like, a systematic theologian would buy this account of, like, human nature and memory and sin and forgiveness, but I think that's the account that we're getting here through the. Through these rivers.
- [32:36]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, it's a. It's a perplexing picture that he gives us. And I like. I like the dichotomy that you've set forward. That one is a erasing of the memory of sin, and the other one is really a restoring of the memory of good deeds. But I think what's interesting is. And you alluded to it as well, is, you know, I think we could really push into. Like, what does that actually mean on the erasing of the memory? Because even when we get to Paradiso, there's people up there that remember their faults and what they did. And so here it's interesting, like, this is, like. Because I think what we're gonna see is a confession scene. And so here this kind of forgetfulness seems to be, in a lot of ways, like a. Like a washing clean of, like, the attachment to sin or the passions attached to that sin themselves. So the. It was a sinner and I did a sinful act seems to endure, but the attachment and the memory of committing it and maybe the passions connected to that seem to be, like, absolved or erased. And I think we'll see that as we go through that canto. Because I think that whole. Where this river actually comes in is part of this kind of, like, picture that's a very sacramental confession scene. Yeah. And that. And I think. Right. And so I think that's. It's. Yeah, it's an Interesting thing of what he's actually trying to do here, because you're correct, he's taking something. In Greek mythology, we see this with kind of like, with the myth of Ur at the end of the Republic, where they're going to get reincarnated, and they've all chosen what kind of life they want to live, and the last thing that has to happen to them is they drink of the river to wash their memories away so then they don't remember that they chose this life or they've been reincarnated, et cetera. Odysseus does. Wants to come back as a simple. A simple farmer and live a simple life. So. Yeah, no, very good. Any other? Obviously, there's lots of things to discuss. I want to have time to look at the other Kantos, though.
- [34:25]
Dr. Michael West
No, no.
- [34:26]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Any other. Any other kind of final comments on 28?
- [34:29]
Dr. Michael West
No, this is great. Let's do 29. Get into it.
- [34:33]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Oh, yeah, this is wonderful. So this is where. Yeah, this is where I was like, oh, finally. Like, we're getting into the. The weird stuff, and I don't know what's going on anymore. Like, the first time I read this, this was. This was fantastic. So we're sitting here, he's talking to. Or he has, you know, he has this lady that. We're still trying to figure out her identity and what she is. And then we get this, like. Like liturgical train of candelabras and virgins and weird creatures and et cetera. I mean, where do we start? With this?
- [35:07]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah. So your option. And I. I mean, honestly, I think you could either spend, like, the whole. Your whole time on this or. Or. Or what will be like, not. Not very much at all. Yeah, I mean, I. I guess I think of it as he seems. There's something to me, really, like, apocalyptic about this because of all the stuff from Ezekiel and Daniel and Revelation in here. And it's like he meshes all of that imagery with someone. Someone here says it's sort of like an Italian street parade. It's like both of those things are happening. Even the whole sort of, like, people throwing flowers like that. Like, both of those things are happening at once. I think there's something about the way there's these signs that he's, like, not quite ready. So, like, we know that at line 10, it says that they hadn't taken 100 steps when something happened. It's almost like we hadn't. We hadn't really gone very far. And then you also get the line at 18 where he says, well, I Thought there was this brightness. And I. I thought it was lightning, right. But it wasn't lightning. So he's like. He's not quite, like, picking. There's some sort of, like, sense that he's not quite picking up on everything that's going on. He starts complaining about Eve at 24, which he'll do again in 29. Or, sorry, in. In 30. He'll. He. He seems stuck on Eve for some reason. Um, I don't have a theory why that is. I think it's worth noting that he keeps bringing up eth. He doesn't bring up Adam, at least in this context. We get. I guess he. He. He has this.
- [36:46]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
The.
- [36:47]
Dr. Michael West
Around 37, he calls on the. The muses or the. The sacred versions, kind of suggesting that he's entering into a different mode of poetry. That's not simply. It's not going to be easy for him. And maybe it's not going to be easy for us either. I think, like, anytime someone invokes a muse, you know, something kind of intense is coming. So, like in Homer, it's like the. The catalog of the ships at the end of book two of the Iliad is when one of the moments when he evokes the music is he's about to, like, do something kind of hard, which is to remember all those names. And I have the sense here that Dante's saying, I'm about to try to pass on to you what this thing was. I think it's important that he doesn't interpret anything in the pageant. So, like, there's a ton of stuff that people say, like to, you know, the seven golden trees at Free People. People are like, oh, that's the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. I'm kind of like most of these things. I'm sort of happy to go with the people who. No more Italian than I do. But there are times where I feel like. Makes this. It makes it less interesting if you are wholly confident that you know exactly what every everything means. Because then it isn't apocalyptic. It isn't actually an unveiling of something that's beyond you. But I mean, we can. We can get to that. Cause there's a bunch of things, a bunch of numbers that we could talk about if you want to. I don't know where. Where do you want to start?
- [38:10]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, let's. I. I think we was. We can maybe burn through it, like the whole liturgy, the whole perception, and then kind of see where. Like, what. Like, what stands out to you. So, yeah, we have these, like, trees which then sometimes they're sometimes interpreted as seven candlesticks. Sometimes it's a candelabra with seven candles on it. And yeah, this the traditional understanding. So this is what comes first. This is the light. Actually, the muses come first, which he's baptized the muses into the holy virgins. And I agree with you a hundred percent. We saw that when we read Homer, our year of Homer. Like if we'll see that again when we read Odyssey again this summer, is if they invoke the muses, you need to stop and pay attention because something important is about to happen. Because that's what we get. The beginning of the books and then we get it at key parts as we move through. So we have these muses, then we have the candelabra. So maybe the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Yeah, then you have, then you have. Let's see, the next thing we get is he talks about this like rainbow. And then we get the 24 elders, which a lot of people associate with the Old Testament, that this is the Old Testament coming from St. Jerome. Okay. Then we get four very apocalyptic looking animals. Now a lot of people know these because these four animals coming from Ezekiel and from Revelation are often used as symbols, icons of the four Gospels. So we have 24 elders representing the Old Testament. And then we get these four creatures, very apocalyptic looking. He describes them down around 93, which is kind of a mix from Ezekiel and John that represent our four gospels. Then this is the one. I think that really kind of surprised me the first time I read it. That was like, I don't know what he's doing here. What is this thing? Then we have a chariot that is drawn by a griffin, this kind of half lion, half eagle creature. And this is where I remember the first time I read it, I was like, okay, I don't, I don't understand what the analogs are anymore. Like, what is, what is the griffin going to represent? Obviously, I think we'll see it. It becomes more clear. But the chariot is the church and then the griffin. It's really interesting. The griffin is a creature of two natures. So you have the lion and you have the eagle. And so in the medieval mind, the griffin is a symbol of Christ having two natures, both human and divine. And that becomes a little bit more clear later on as we see how Beatrice interacts with it.
- [40:33]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah, I think that's clear, actually. It's because he doesn't really do much with the, with the griffin, at least here. No, he passes over the Griffin and then talks about a bunch of other stuff. So it's only when Beatrice looks at the griffin, they have that intense moment at the end of 31, I think, where we kind of have a sense of what that was about. But I'm sorry, go ahead. Yes. We have our griffin, and then we have our chariots.
- [40:57]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Our chariot. Then we get three ladies while dancing patterns. And he talks about this around the right wheel. This is done at, like, 121. These are typically interpreted as the three theological virtues. So faith, hope, and charity. These are the virtues that have to be infused in you. They have to be given to you via your baptism because you have grace and the Holy Spirit. Then you have four ladies after that. And so obviously, this would be naturally the four cardinal virtues. So this is prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. These are the virtues that are available to all men and women by virtue of being human, by being a rational animal. This is how you can live according to reason, different powers of your soul, et cetera. If we don't understand that one of them is prudence, she has three eyes, and so that kind of makes it more clear. So she has a third eye.
- [41:47]
Dr. Michael West
What's your understanding of three eyes? Like, how is that the right image for prudence and not just grotesque?
- [41:53]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Well, yeah, maybe she's not as beautiful. It's hard to. It's hard to picture a beautiful picture there. And then she has a third eye in the middle of her head. But, I mean, prudence. So let's talk about what prudence is. So prudence is the elective habit. Prudence is being able to actually choose the right way, the means by which you will accomplish a good. And it's important to understand that, because a lot of times if you don't understand prudence, well, you say it's just choosing the right thing. The problem is that then all the virtues just become some species of prudence. So justice is just prudence when you're dealing with, you know, what's due to other people. Temperance is just prudence when dealing with pleasurable things. And. And courage is just prudence of dealing with, you know, things that are fearful that would cause you to, you know, run away from reason. And so prudence is then one way to look at prudence is when it is the elective habit of the. It's the means by which you do these things is that temperance might set an end. Like, I don't need another glass of Scotch. No second glass of scotch for me. Prudence, though, is. How do I go about doing that. And that can happen in many different ways. That might just be. I don't pour another glass. Congratulations, I'm done. It might be that if I'm struggling with alcoholism, it might be that I need to put the bottle away. I have to lock it up. I might need to pour it down the drain. I might need to throw it out the window. There's many different things of what Prudence says. How do I accomplish this end by which it's done? So Prudence, then. Right. Is the way that you're supposed to see how to actually live the good life. Like, what is the actual path to doing that? So while she doesn't sound too beautiful, it does make sense to me that Prudence then has, you know, a third eye in it.
- [43:28]
Dr. Michael West
Is the idea that Prudence has. Is involved. The third eye somehow symbolizes like. Like she has really good vision. Not just 2020, but like three eyes that are 2020 or something like that.
- [43:42]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah. I mean, she's the virtue of being able to see the right path. Like, prudent man is the man who actually then sees the path of virtue. Because without prudence, you might have. You might say, well, I actually do want to be temperate. I do have courage. But when you decouple the virtues from Prudence, you really don't have virtue. It's not going to work. So not only does she have to see, but she's also the leader, which I think that I can't remember if he makes this comment. I know he does. In the three Theological Virtues, it talks about who's leading the dance.
- [44:12]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah, they keep the cadence. She sets the tone.
- [44:15]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, right. So she's going to be that. That leader. You have to have prudence, because also then prudence is the only one that's both an intellectual and a moral virtue. So it also has another distinguishing fact about it. Right. So, no, I don't know. It seems. It seems to make sense to me because it's all about sight. It's all about vision. What is the path? How do I lead that? Does it make for a beautiful image in the head?
- [44:38]
Dr. Michael West
Maybe not, but maybe that's like. Part of it is that there's something kind of bizarre about this whole setup. And to. I guess what I want to. What I would want to hold in mind is that both. It. You know, it is a sort of. There is a kind of theology or anthropology or insight about, you know, say, prudence's relation to the other virtues. But instead of saying, did you know that prudence sets the way for the other virtues. He says, here's a woman with three eyes. Um, and there's something about just like, that's a, that's a, it's a different kind of, it's a different kind of mode, let's put it that way. I wouldn't want to underrate the difference between that really like eloquent kind of account you just gave of prudence and the kind of account that Dante's giving us here, which is, it's very striking. You were very eloquent, but you weren't as striking as a three eyed woman. I want to say that.
- [45:29]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Well, I think so. I think you, I think you nailed it. Which is, this is apocalyptic. And so if you think about like the apocalyptic language, so it's not just symbolic. We have a very particular type of symbolism that's being used here. And we know that he's pulling from Ezekiel, he's pulling from John. This is the apocalyptic literature in which it takes kind of, you know, these cosmic and sometimes grotesque images and, and uses them as analogs for the spiritual life or for church history or whatever it is. And I think maybe one example of this would be, is obviously when we talk about our Lord, we want to show our Lord in beautiful ways. We want to show our Lord. And so like, you know, the Lamb that stands slain. Okay, that's a beautiful image. We have all this. Every once in a while someone's like, hey, by the way, Revelation actually says this lamb has seven eyes. Let's try and do that in art. Every time I've ever seen that done, I'm like, I. This does not bring me closer to God. That is the most bizarre, weird looking creature I have ever seen. So maybe your intuitions here, your sensitivities are correct insofar as there's something in the apocalyptic imagery that is unsettling. That is something that is a bit bizarre because. Yeah, that's. This is a simple thing that I could think about from Revelation, that there's our picture of our Lord. It makes sense when you read it. But if you actually try and think of the image or you see images in which they give the lamb seven eyes. Yeah, it's really bizarre and unsettling.
- [46:55]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah. Okay, what I want to hear, let's think about the seven, the seven people walking here. So this is right after. So he says the two old men at 1:34. And I don't, honestly, I don't really have a great understanding of why the people who are missing are missing. So according to most interpretations, the one conjoint the, the one about Great Hippocrates. That's, that's Luke the doctor. Right, Think. And then the guy with the sword is Saint Paul, we think.
- [47:30]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Correct. Yeah.
- [47:31]
Dr. Michael West
And then there's this, you know, I saw four humble in their aspect. So people say that's the like lesser epistles, so sort of the rest of the New Testament. And then the old man who walks as though he slept is St. John. But the question is, why are we missing some of the Gospels? We're missing two gospels. We're missing Matthew and Mark here. And I don't really have any answer for why that is, honestly.
- [47:57]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Okay, so that's great.
- [47:59]
Dr. Michael West
I guess. I'm sorry, I'm actually thinking about it now. It must be that he's thinking of Luke as the author of Acts and not as. And John not as the author of the Gospel.
- [48:08]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Correct.
- [48:09]
Dr. Michael West
So there's something about. But it's interesting to me that he like separates Luke the author of Acts and Luke the author of the Gospel and John the author of the Gospel and John the author of Revelation. I found that very, like a very strange way of thinking about the New Testament. And maybe that's, that does seem to be, I guess, the model that he's working with here.
- [48:27]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
And actually I think I could be wrong here because I'm just looking at my notes. I'd have to look at Musa. I think John. John is actually then symbolized three times.
- [48:35]
Dr. Michael West
John's in the four. Yeah.
- [48:37]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah. So John is one of the Gospels. He's one of four other writers. And then he's also Revelation.
- [48:44]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
- [48:45]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
So because John's actually in the procession three times.
- [48:48]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah. And why, why are they old? I don't actually have. Do you have a sense of why it. Or at least why are Luke, Paul and John old? I guess John is old in Revelation because we, we think that he wrote it at the end of his life. But why are Luke and Paul. Do you have a thought about that?
- [49:06]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
No, that's a good question. Yeah. The, the, the, the aged man. Yeah. John, that makes sense because it refers to the fact that he's not a martyr. He got to actually live his life. Yeah. Refers to Luke and Paul as two ancient men. I don't know. I took that. I guess my, my knee jerk reaction to that was just that they're old from when Dante's seeing them, if that makes sense.
- [49:30]
Dr. Michael West
Okay. Yeah. Or, or, or that they, I guess they, they have. I mean, it gives them a kind of like venerability kind of. They seem to be. I Mean, now I'm thinking about it. If you think of it as like a kind of procession, it's like a procession has different kinds of people in it. You have sort of the. The beautiful young female dancers. You know, I think about the 4th of July parade in my town. And it's like you get like the drill team and like, all that stuff. And then you get to like old dudes in the classic cars kind of like driving, you know, really, they don't even. They're not even walking. They're so old, they. They can't really walk. There's this feeling of like the whole community is here. We got all the types and maybe that's part of what's at stake. And just. You got the old ones.
- [50:13]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah. No, Very good. Yeah. I mean, I love this part. I thought it was a wonderful procession. I love. This is one of the things about Dante I love is, like, looking at these and trying to figure out, like, what does he mean and how is this catechetical and what's he trying to teach us? Yeah. Yeah. Any other, I mean, any other thoughts, though, before we jump into 30 about the procession or anything here in 29?
- [50:33]
Dr. Michael West
I think it's the moment that I always remember is around 55, when he. When the procession first comes into view. He has this moment. So my translation, it's full of wonder. I turned to my good Virgil and that's like he's doing. He's doing that for like 50 something Kantos at this point. Right. And I love this reaction. And he answered with a look no less charged with amazement. It's one of those moments where you look at your, you know, your teacher, the person who always knows what's going on, and you look at that person and the person looks back and says, I have no idea what's going on. I. I think of this moment, the Dante Vernon relationship here is very much about, like, finds. It's. It's like a bunch of relationships, but it is a kind of teacher student relationship in which the teacher can take the student only so far. And it's actually really important that you have an experience of seeing your teachers be kind of baffled by things just like you. Um, I think that's actually like a really important moment in a. In a human life. And I. And I hear that as part of what's happening here. Cause it's going to prepare us for what's going to happen in 30 with Virgil.
- [51:50]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah. I. So on that exact note, I think one of the. Yeah. To just piggyback on what you said 1. Virgil's outside is depth. So our guide, our trusty guide, right. Once he. Once he basically crowned Dante, Virgil now is. Is just kind of along for the ride. And I think that's really important because we have. Obviously, we'll see here quite quickly what happens in 30. But I think there's something here to watch of what I would ask. What I would ask at this juncture is why does Providence allow Virgil to remain? Why does Virgil get to see all of this? He's not actually guiding Dante anymore. He seems to have fulfilled his purpose after he crowned him. And so there's going to be this handoff from Virgil to Beatrice. And so, no, I think one. I think one thing to ask here is why is it that Providence allows Virgil to see all of these things? Because it might be an answer, and I'm not sure it's a satisfactory one, but it might be an answer to, I think, one of the most difficult questions in the entire comedy, which comes up in Canto 30. So let's do it. Let's look at Canto 30. Let's get there. Okay, so this is really fascinating. So here we're going to get the appearance of Beatrice. And so let's look at some of these preliminaries that were given, because we have to. We got. We've got to figure out who she is. Like, what does she actually represent. We've gone through all of hell and now almost all of purgatory to finally get Beatrice. And so let's kind of look at this. The first thing that really caught my attention was on the tercet that starts on line 10 is where we see this, where the. He's quoting the Song of Songs. Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse. So this is kind of layered. So, okay, why. Why are we now talking about Lebanon in the middle of Beatrice coming out? So this is from the Song of Songs, which is obviously between the two lovers. And there is an allegorical read, obviously of the Song of Songs, which can be between Christ and his church or between, say, the soul and wisdom. And so here I think we see very much Beatrice is going to play a role of that sapiential role and of her being wisdom. So here we have this kind of like, cry. But what I want to tether it to is something you've already mentioned, that tethering, that cry for wisdom is deeply contextualized within the erotic. So the analog, the literal read Song of Songs is this relationship between the lovers, which is obviously sexual at times. And then it can be Read allegorically as the soul and wisdom, or Christ in his church, you know, various different ways. And sometimes, again, all of Erotics throws us for a loop as moderns, particularly as Christians, because we tend to either interpret it as Puritan or pornographic. We don't really have a great understanding of, like, erotics inside the Western canon and how it's been viewed pretty much since the time of Plato. So here, just as a preliminary, I find it really fascinating that that's the kind of the opening that wisdom is coming, but it's inside of this context of the feminine, inside of the erotic. And then we get at. What is that? Like 19. We get two things that I thought was really interesting, which is we get a. Another benediction. Right. Blessed. We actually. There was one actually in 29, I think, or maybe in 28 as well. We're still getting these beatitudes that's kind of tracking throughout the Purgatorio. This one is blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. What's really interesting here is, is that he couples it immediately with a line from Virgil, give lilies with full hands. And I think this is going to be really interesting because he's got Scripture and then the Aeneid. And this is another kind of, like, final quote from the Aeneid before we get to, you know, what happens to Virgil. And so I just want to. I want to flag that.
- [55:42]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
- [55:42]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
But then we get lady. So, of course, like Beatrice, the lady comes down, she tells Dante he's done a great job. They hug each other, they're very happy to see each other, etc. Right. This threw me for a. The first time I read the Purgatorio, I was like. I was, like, so excited. Like, finally, we finally get to see Beatrice.
- [56:06]
Dr. Michael West
Okay.
- [56:06]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
And, you know, so let's.
- [56:08]
Dr. Michael West
Hold on.
- [56:08]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
So let's take this.
- [56:09]
Dr. Michael West
This is the question. The question is like, yeah, okay, so, yes, that is not what happens if your readers are following along at home. But to me, there's. I guess I would. A ton happens between the sort of line 21 and then when she talks. But I guess he sees her or he finally mentions her. I mean, so at 22, he starts talking about the break of day and the sky and the sunrise, and it goes on forever. There's this, like, really long description about sunrise. And then he talks about thus. So it. And then he moves into the other part of the simile, and he. And Beatrice is, like, hidden. This is so interesting. So in mine, it's at 27, he says, within the cloud of blossoms rising from angelic hands and fluttering back down into the chariot and around it. So that's like three lines about flowers going around. And you're like, come on, get to it, get to it, get to it. And then he. He says, olive crowned above a veil of white, appeared to me a lady beneath a green mantle, dressed in the color of living flame. And you're like, okay, it's some lady. Hopefully this is Beatrice, finally. And then he starts talking about his own feelings, which I think is really interesting. And I think you can. You can kind of read this. Some people read this as sort of like, what's wrong with you, Dante? I. I think it's a way of him giving kind of weight to the situation that he talks about what it. What it felt like for him. But then he says, I couldn't see her at 37. He says, I couldn't see her with my eyes, though the hidden force that came from her. I felt the overwhelming power of that ancient love. So there you have, like, an encounter with a person, but you can't see the person's face, but you're beginning to feel something of what that person has to offer. And then he says, once the majestic force hits him, and now we're at 43, he does this kind of amazing moment that we can spend the whole time on if we want. He says, I turn my life with confidence, with the confidence a child has running to his mama when he is afraid or in distress to say to Virgil. So the first thing he does is he sees her. And then he wants. Well, he turns to someone with the confidence of a child who is scared, who's going to cling to his mom. And so there's something. There's something like, overwhelming and intimidating about this person. And so I think it's important that it's like, if there's some erotic thing going on, which I think there is, he is not, like, feeling very possessive right now. He wants to cling to mom's skirts, which is, of course, a little odd. If this is your, like, lifelong love, you. You should probably just, like, encounter that person instead of talking to your boy. But that's what he does. And then he. And then he says, this is what I was. What I was going to say. But he doesn't actually say it, it seems. And he says, not a single drop of blood remains in me that does not tremble. I know the signs of the ancient flame. But Virgil had departed, leaving us bereft. Virgil, sweetest of fathers. Virgil Tomb. I gave myself for my salvation. So I hear this. I mean, there's. Okay, I hear this as he says what he was going to say but didn't actually say to Virgil. It feels problematic in a lot of ways. Why isn't he talking to her? Why is he talking to Virgil? Also, why did Virgil do, like an Irish goodbye here where he. He left without saying goodbye? And then even more problematic is. I don't know. Have you all read the. If you. Have you read the Aeneid? I guess you. You know about the Aeneid from this. But in. In the Aeneid, those lines about. I know the signs of the ancient flame. That is what Virgil's. In the Aeneid by Virgil. That is what Dido says to her sister when she decides she's going to embark on a catastrophic love affair with Aeneas that's going to end in her suicide and the Punic wars hundreds of years later. So essentially, this is. This is what you say to someone when you're about to make a terrible, terrible mistake in. In the dimension of love. And that is. And that is. And that is such a sort of. There's. There's. There's something like, very unsettled and uncomfortable about everything about this scene. There's this sense that. That Dante is. Is not that he. And theaters are not clicking right away, to say the least. And a lot of that is at stake in, I think, him. And also, it's. It's. It's sort of the last. It's one of the last quotes from the Aeneid. It's just. It's a direct quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, which is very strange even for Dante. So. I'm sorry. Yeah. What. What are. What do you hear in this moment? Or what do you. What else do we need to pull out?
- [60:57]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Oh, I love it. I just love this whole passage. I think it's wonderful. Yeah. Let me. Let me read just a little bit of this from Baxter, because I think that he. I think he. I just love how he phrases this. So down at 37, he says, even though I couldn't know her with my eyes, my spirit felt a secret power coming forth from her, the prime primal strength of the ancient love. And then down to the turret, right before Virgil leaves to say the Virgil, no drop of blood is left within me that isn't trembling. I feel the traces of the ancient flame. And then he turns around and this was a complete gut punch to me. The first time I read the Purgatorio, I could not believe it. You Say the Irish goodbye. That's great. I like that. Where he's just gone. Are you kidding? We've come to love Virgil. He's been the guide the whole time. He's gone through hell, then he's gone through purgatory, which I think it still think is a big question. Why was Virgil the guide through purgatory? You think he would have been a saint? Do you think it would have been someone else on their journey? Something like that? He didn't know Hell. Like, he. He didn't know purgatory the way he knew Hell. So. And also the fact that Dante the poet, I mean, he just masterfully does this because he mixes both emotions. So you're right in this, getting to see Beatrice the lady, Dante realizes who it is. You're getting all the emotions of Dante throughout this entire deal, and then right in the middle of it, you get the gut punch that Virgil is gone. I mean, he. The juxtaposition he gives you here is tremendous. So there's a. Let's talk about Virgil. So why is he the guide? I mean, what. Like, why. What is going on in these passages? I mean, it's. It's something that really bothered me the first time I read it. I really wanted Virgil to be saved. I thought Virgil going through purgatory, maybe he would get. You know, we're gonna find out later that the saints pray. Emperor Trajan was really nice to, like a widow. And St. Gregory prayed and he rose from the dead, baptized Emperor Trajan, and then he died again so he could go to heaven. So don't tell me these things are impossible. If divine providence wants it done, it's done. Also, the last guy to enter heaven is a pagan suicide. So we can. We can figure it out if we want to get Virgil there. So that was something that really struck me because I. That's what I was hoping. It's like, oh, he's going to be able to go up the mountain. He'll be able to do this, et cetera. There's a few things that, you know are. Particularly as our modern sensibility is, how is this fair to Virgil? You know, we. We like equality, we like egalitarianism, we like these types of things. So how, like, Virgil just did all this work. He took him through hell and then up through purgatory. And I think one way to look at this, I think this has been mentioned by others too, is that this. This last passage here, and really all of Purgatory has been, in a certain way, a gift or a thank you to Virgil that he gets to see what he should never be able to see. So he is, he has been justly condemned to limbo. And we have to be careful, we have to be very careful here because if we pity Virgil, then we're falling right back into the same trap that Dante the pilgrim fell into with Francesca, that we set our pity contrary to divine providence. Virgil is where he needs to be according to everything that's true, good and beautiful. So it seems to me then that one way to look at this is the whole journey through purgatory was somewhat of a gift to Virgil. He gets to see all these things that he otherwise would not be able to see because also they have to pick up Statius at one point and Virgil's asking people which way to go. Like he's not serving the same role he did in the Inferno. Yeah, and I think too, as we kind of, as I was alluding to in the last canto, Virgil being able to see the procession and see all of this in the coming of Beatrice, I think really is his final gift. And then I think that's why we got this kind of like rapid fire citations to the Aeneid, because it's like this final goodbye. So we get one right, we got one right there at the beginning that I mentioned around line 21, where the line from the Aeneid is mentioned right alongside Scripture. And then the very last thing he says to him is an allusion from the Aeneid as well, which you pointed out about the ancient flame. So I'm not saying that like emotionally I'm satisfied with what happens to Virgil. For first time readers, if you felt gut punched, I was right there with you. I stopped reading. I had to like think about it for I was like, what? That's it? There's no emotional goodbye. I thought there'd be a talk. Beatrice and Virgil and Dante would get together and conference about this thing or something like, I don't know, what do you think?
- [65:26]
Dr. Michael West
I think maybe it's because I, I, I'm a teacher, but I just, I feel like there's, there's something about Virgil's this sort of one way to think about Virgil is he is whoever that person is in your life. When you were coming into a kind of maturity, who was, who was ahead of you in, in what? Like, because I, to me, I think the most important thing about Virgil is that Dante wants to be as good a poet as Virgil. And he sort of represents reason, sort of. But I think more than anything else, he's just he like, wants his job, he wants to be him. And that experience of wanting to be someone who's really good at the thing that you would like to be good at is, you know, almost universal. It goes up and down. And then you also have this thing. What if that person were willing to help you? But the problem then is that you have to. You are you and that person is that person. And on a certain level, you. I guess I said at the beginning I'm interested in sort of the limits of education. And I think of this as the limits of mentorship or of, or of coaching or of, you know, spiritual direction or anything like that. It's like you're you. You lean on this other person. This other person is supposed to help you grow. But the truth is, is you will surpass not because you're better than that person necessarily, but just because you are you. And you will reach a point where you have to live your own life. And there is this kind of separation that will happen. I think what I like about the way Dante does it is that you know that that moment has happened only after it has occurred. You, you never, you never know when you're done with your, with your mentor or your guide. I think Dante is really capturing the, the truth of that and sort of the, the pain of that. That you would like for it to be like a clean, nice thing where you have a reception. But that's, that's actually just not how human relationships work, is that we, we just find ourselves from a certain point realizing that person is no longer in my head, or I no longer. And that person no longer with me in the way that they were before. And it's not through any fault of mine or of their. And it's not the relationship went bad. It's just what it means to have this kind of relationship. It has a kind of shelf life. I think I like the theory. I had a student once suggest that something about the whole poem is just a kind of. There's this sort of note of kind of mourning for Virgil, which I. Which I hear in the poem. And I think that Dante has the same feelings that, you know, you had as first time reader and a lot of us have, which is we don't love that Virgil's not there and we don't really quite understand it. And my own view of most of when Dante asked these kinds of questions in Paradiso is that no one has a really great answer for why Virgil's not there. They just sort of say that's the will of God. And we. We know that God is not constrained by all these things because of the examples you gave, but we don't really know why it is that Trajan and Ripheus are here, but Virgil's. But Virgil's not. I don't know. I think that's actually a good sort of, like, lesson that Dante is teaching us. Like, it's okay to have our own feelings about how the world should be and also to have confidence that God and his Providence, for whatever reason, that is not the world that God is bring into being. And we need to have that experience. Maybe not actually understanding how those things fit together as a part of the kind of spiritual growth, I guess.
- [68:59]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, well said. That's a good moral read. You know, the other thing, too, I would add from Virgil, the character, is that he's asked several times about why he's here and what he's doing, and he never alludes to the fact that he thinks what's happened to him is an injustice.
- [69:17]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah.
- [69:17]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
He always talks about why, like, what he lacked. And. Yeah, I think that, you know, and there's, like, you know, that Dante the poet is twisting a knife intentionally so. Like, even, like with Statius, he shows that Virgil helped him become a Christian, but Virgil himself is condemned. Or even, like, by meeting Cato, it's like, really, the pagan suicide gets to make it, I think. I think. But also, Dante the poet is very comfortable doing this. We've seen him multiple times in the Inferno, have. Have his own friends in hell. So there is something, I think, that Dante is teaching us to Virgil. I think it's a difficult lesson and one that I'm. I'm actually still very much pondering myself. But we don't have Virgil anymore. We now we have Beatrice, and she has a slightly different tone than Virgil does. So let's look at this. So one thing I didn't appreciate until, actually, as I was looking over this today, I did not realize that this is the first time in the entire comedy in which Dante is called by name.
- [70:16]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah. So I think it's the only time. Is that right?
- [70:20]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
I don't know if it's the only time. I don't remember, but this is. I know this is the first time
- [70:23]
Dr. Michael West
that he has actually called. Yeah, and that's her first.
- [70:27]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, her first. Her first word is Dante. It's 55. Dante. Has Virgil gone away? Don't cry. Don't cry about it yet. You'll cry, but from a different sword. Well, thank you, Beatrice. That's incredibly comforting. I really Appreciate that. Right, so here's this guy. He's already like, you know, his blood's a flame and he's Twitter pated. Because here comes Beatrice. Then his mentor gets yanked away from him right in the middle of all these emotions. And then she is just going to lay into him, even, like, sarcastically. So. So let's kind of like, just play this out. So she's coming down. She's very much presented again as wisdom. So it talks about her veil cascading from her head. It talks about Minerva's leaves. So it's like Athena. She has, like, this Athena iconography around. And then she names herself. So this is 73. Look. Well, it's really me. I am Beatrice. How did you dare to climb this mountain? You didn't know that here a man is happy? So she knows very well why he's climbing the mountain. And then juxtaposes him crying about Virgil with, hey, don't you know people are happy here? Baxter's is not as evident, but if you read, like, Musa. Musa translates this as sarcasm, as she's being sarcastic to him.
- [71:52]
Dr. Michael West
Don't you know you're supposed to be happy?
- [71:54]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah. And, like, how did you make it up here? How did you even make it? How'd you even make it up this mountain? And now, don't you know this, where people are supposed to be happy? So you're not even supposed to be here, and you're crying in the place where everyone's supposed to be happy. What are you doing right now? As Dante the pilgrim is just being torn apart by all these different emotions that hit him all at the same time. It's interesting, too. One thing I thought was interesting, as he kind of pushes into this, that the angels are somewhat sympathetic to Dante about how harsh Beatrice is on him. I thought this was kind of fascinating. So that's around, like, because how's she come down? I thought it was really. You mentioned it, but I thought it was worth mentioning. So the angels all appear. They're singing. They're like, in a circle. And then all of a sudden, there's just this rain of flowers that is coming down. And she. She descends in the midst of this, like, beautiful cascade. So all these angels are still here. And he mentions them around 93. And then they ask, when I heard within the sweetness of their harmonies, how they were suffering with me, as if they said, lady, why tear him down? So even the angels are, like, sympathetic to Dante. But Beatrice, right, says she stood unmoved. And then she gives her response at it's around 108. But my response is more concerned to make the one who yonder weeps attend to me so he can counterbalance guilt with sorrow. Well, that's charming. So he's got to make sure that his guilt actually matches his sorrow. So this is what she was talking about earlier about the swords, is that you're crying now, but you need to cry more because you don't understand things yet.
- [73:35]
Dr. Michael West
So why does he need. I mean, that's, to me, like that. Like this moment where she says, like, you need. You're gonna need to really cry. And then we're gonna get into that sort of penance confession thing in the next one. Does that mean that at 26, when Virgil says, I crown and miter you lord over yourself. Virgil was just wrong because there's this sense of, like, the. The. The work is done. From now on, let pleasure be your guide, is what he says. And the question is, is. Is. Is Virgil just wrong when he says that? Because Beatrice is sort of like, there's some unfinished business here. And so what's the relationship between whatever kind of completion Virgil thought he saw at 26 and whatever work Beatrice thinks need to be done? I mean, it's sort of like, you know, Dante shows up and he's like, yeah, I'm ready. I got this all figured out. And then there's like, you know, the new boss who's like, no, no, no. You got. You got a lot of room for improvement, my friend.
- [74:41]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
I think that's a fantastic. No, it's a fantastic question. It's a fantastic question. So let's. Let's push into that, because I think that one. Yes, your juxtaposition is. Is quite true. I think another way to phrase it would be, didn't he just get purged of all seven deadly sins? Yeah, like what.
- [74:59]
Dr. Michael West
What is.
- [75:00]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Like, what are you. And he's gone through the fire. So, like, what are you doing right now? So I think my. So I'll throw out my theses here, and then. And then we can look at the text. So one of them is. Is that I think that when Virgil crowns him, right, one of the things that she asks is that he's going to have to look at. Is he's having to look at how he's lived his life. So we've actually gone from something. This is something that I think is really interesting, and I think that Musa talked about this, where Dante the pilgrim shifts here for really the first time, maybe the first time in the whole comedy, where when he's Named by name. We're shifting the narrative from Dante as the analog of humanity to actually now we're looking at Dante very much as Dante the pilgrim himself in his own sins. And so I think one thing to look at here is that she's critiquing him about how he's lived his life. And so one way to look at it is that it wasn't until he could actually be purged of the seven deadly sins and have his soul in order that he actually could reflect properly upon his life and name his sin correctly. And I think that that gets coupled with the fact of, okay, but shouldn't this have already happened? Because he's gone through all seven deadly sins. And I think that's a great question. Because how I would phrase it is that the sin that she calls him out on is incredibly fundamental. It's underneath, in a certain way, all the seven deadly sins. It's a fundamental disorder that is underneath all other disorders. And so let's look at this, because that's what she's calling out in him. And that's the harshness of this. So this starts around. She gives the reason around 108, like I read. And then, I don't know, around. Somewhere around, like 114, she says, this man. So this is the accusation. Yeah. This man was given power and new life so much that every righteous disposition should have found in him a marvelous proof. And yet uncultivated fields, once sown with worthless seeds. Become more overgrown and noxious the more there's vigor in the soil. Somewhile I helped him with my face and showed him to my youthful eyes. And drew him toward the righteous goal along with me. As soon as I had set foot upon the threshold of my second age and changed my life, so she died. He went away from me and gave himself to another. Although I'd risen from the flesh to spirit and beauty and virtue had grown in me. I was to him less dear and less pleasing. He turned his steps along an untrue path, pursuing shadows of false goods which never pray their promissory notes in full. Nor did my begging for his inspiration result in any good. Through dreams and other means, I called him back. It mattered nothing to him. He fell so low that all these means and tools for his salvation were insufficient, with one exception, to have him see the races of the lost. So basically, he became so lost. Go back to the beginning. Lost in dark woods halfway through his life. The only way to get this guy back on the right path was to send him to hell. That's it? So what's going on in this passage? Let me tell you what I think is happening. There's two things that I think are really fascinating. One is the sin that she's calling out that I mentioned earlier. That's like the fundamental problem is the problem of apparent goods, that the soul has what it should desire, which is the good God, but it seeks after apparent goods, the shadows of goods. So we. Everyone wants to be happy, like we said earlier. And so everyone seeks what they think is good for them. You don't choose things that you think are bad for you. You choose what's going to make you happy. Sometimes, you know, the thing that you're choosing is not the good thing, but you still choose it anyway because you still want to be happy and you think that thing will give you some happiness. So even if you fall into alcoholism, if you fall into pornography, if you fall into whatever it is, you're still choosing that. I think this thing will actually make me happy. Even if, you know, long term, this thing probably will actually pan out and make me sad. All your decisions that you make are oriented towards becoming happy. So the one thing I think on the fundamental level that she's calling him out on is that he knew, or should have known, and that's the second part of why, what the true good was. And he allowed these shadows of the goods to overwhelm his life. And that's where he satiated his desires and became so disordered until the only way to save him was to send him to hell. Now, the second part of that is. And why it's personal to her is this is what's fascinating. I just love this. And this goes back to erotics. Beatrice now sees herself. This is how I read it, so please push back. Beatrice now sees herself in her beauty as an icon of God. And that Dante, the pilgrim, as a young man, was given Beatrice basically as a gift, as an icon, as a sign of God's goodness that was supposed to call him to God himself. So he got a special grace, if you will, in Beatrice herself and her short life and his. Like two or three times he ever saw her. In Dante's soul. That was a grace from God, where Beatrice was an icon. Her beauty, her feminine beauty, was an icon of beauty itself, of God. And this was grace sufficient for Dante to choose a beautiful life. And then even after she dies and he's bereft of the icon, it still should have been enough for him to choose the good. And then even after that, she begged for his inspiration through Dreams and other means, probably because through. And also through, like, his imagination. Right. He's remembering her, he knows her, and yet he rejects that icon and doesn't go to beauty itself and allows himself to go towards lesser goods, lesser beauties. And so I just find this to be just fat. What you mentioned earlier, this is the problem of erotics, like, 101. And Dante, in a lot of ways, just makes us incredibly incarnational in Beatrice, that for the young man's soul, the beauty of the woman, the feminine form, is actually an invitation to understand the beauty of God. And Dante is given a phenomenal grace, the icon of God's beauty in Beatrice, and just totally fumbles it to the point of, like. To the point of he becomes so disordered, we got to send this guy to hell to save him.
- [81:41]
Dr. Michael West
So in your mind, I think this. That this is really smart, what you're saying, that the kind of path through at least Purgatory. Yeah. Is sort of, like, discreet, and it's a way of, like, sort of breaking down what are the different ways in which we are not yet capable of God. But because one thing that people. I feel like it's. People look at this passage here, you know, about the untrue way and the pursuing the false images of good. And there's this kind of, like, prurience, but, like. But what was his sin? What was it really? And I think your argument is that the whole point is that it's kind of generic. It's not. It's cast in the terms of a kind of, he didn't appreciate me, how beautiful I was. But not. She's not saying that in, like, a petty way. She means that as like. This is a way of talking about sort of, like, the overall orientation of a soul independent of the specific ways in which one might wander from that. Good. But I think it's interesting that we're also back about the steps and the walking. We're back to Inferno 1 here, where there's this. There's this question of, like, what exactly has gone wrong in Dante's life. We know that he got exiled from Florence, but, like, you know, what were his big sins? And all he really tells us, I think, is, like, well, pride. But that's not very interesting or hard to figure out. And I think it. There's a way in which I. I like that there's this. There's this sort of larger way of just talking about the moral life or the. The spiritual life that is different from talking about the virtues and the seven deadly sins, which is. And it's saying, you're on a. You're on a journey and did you lose the path or not? And that's the image that she gives us here, which is I think, actually, in many ways, like, much more powerful than the image of all the different sins and all the different virtues that are being cultivated in Purgatory.
- [83:33]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, I think it's too easy. That's really interesting insight, like, from your students and, like, what they. What they desire. But I think it's too easy to then look at this as, like, oh, there must be some, like, one fundamental sin that Dante did that somehow has gone unpurged on the mountain of purgatory. That's not it. I think what's happening is the. This is the sin of Eve. And I think that you mentioned. Why is Eve mentioned so much? I'd like to think about that more and maybe put her in juxtaposition to Beatrice. But this is also Eve's mistake. Eve chose a lesser good. She chose a good that she thought would result in something that also was good, to be like God. Satan doesn't come down and tell Eve, reject God. You know, be your own God, blah, blah, blah, blah. He perverts something that is positive to be like God. And that's what she pursues. She. She. She chooses what she perceives to be good to bring happiness over her true, authentic good. This is the problem of Eden. And so I think that this is what's happening between Dante and Beatrice is like they're just playing out again what the problem of Eden is. The fundamental problem with humanity is that we, even when we're trying to better ourselves, we choose the wrong good. We choose apparent goods and not the true good. So I don't think. I take it as a primal pattern of the problem of humanity, the condition of man, than, say, like, one particular sin that somehow only Beatrice can call out. It's just that Beatrice is ordained to call it out because now that she is part of the beatific vision and she sees what her role was on earth, which, by the way, was very short, she sees then that part of her role was to be a muse to Dante, that she was supposed to help him in his erotic appetite for God to reorient towards the divine, which, by the way, in his love poetry, you know, that's what the Inferno is, or, excuse me, the Comedy. It's playing out his love poetry. He realizes this and he talks about. He'll praise Beatrice's beauty and say, oh, this is your beauty. Which led me to him, he changes it. This is what makes Dante's courtly love poetry so different than the other poetry is that the woman, the feminine form, that icon of feminine beauty, then leads you to God, to beauty itself. And I think that's what we see here. Personally, I think that's what we see with Beatrice. I think there's lots of interesting things here. The only other thing I would mention in Canto, I didn't really have an appreciation for this until I read it again this morning, is the motif of pity comes back, not to pity. So it's interesting that even the angels now granted to push back. That's Dante's interpretation of what he thinks the angels are doing. So that's a little murky.
- [86:12]
Dr. Michael West
So maybe there's something self indulgent there.
- [86:15]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Right, it's a little murky. But remember, we had Francesca, we had Dante fainting in hell multiple times. We just talked about Virgil here again, we get that you don't pity. Pity has. Well, you can pity, but pity has to be aligned with divine providence. The entire journey of the Comedy is precipitated by pity. The Blessed Virgin Mary has pity upon Dante, Dante the pilgrim. But then we see pity oriented in multiple different disordered ways as well. So here, I think, with Beatrice just laying into Dante the pilgrim and saying, hey, you fumbled the ball here tremendously. And by the way, in a lot of ways you can look at it, Beatrice's role in Divine providence in her life, a huge part of her role was just to be amused to Dante, to allow him to go to God in her short life. That was like her day. And she did it well and he messed it up. And now when she's connected to God and Divine Providence, she can now see that role and see how he screwed it up and he. And she calls him out on it.
- [87:19]
Dr. Michael West
Last thing is. I just. The last line, I think, is helpful because it gets us ready for the next one where she says that she needs. He needs penitence that shows itself in tears. And so there's. It's clear that there's a. There's a good version of crying. It's not that, like, crying is bad. In fact, she's like, no, no, you. You will have to cry. That is, in fact, a requirement here. And I feel like so much of these two Cantos where Dante is always crying is like, about, like, what makes you cry and do you cry for good reasons? Is one thing he's thinking about. Do you wanna go to 30 or 31?
- [88:00]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, let's look at 31. But we've. But the thing about 31 is, it's nice is that it plays out a lot of the themes that we just talked about in 30. So really, 31. I think the best way to read 31 is that this is the sacrament of confession. It plays all these things out. He's been accused of his sins, he has to state his sin, he has to own it, he has to be sorry for it, and then he's going to be purged of it. So she leads him through this kind of like final confession scene, through this, and we see this. I mean, you know, it's interesting. Just. I'm gonna point a few things out. So around like 10, she says, what are you thinking? Respond to me. The water hasn't yet erased your bitter memories. So she's demanding an answer here. You can answer this question.
- [88:43]
Dr. Michael West
And there's sarcastic there, too.
- [88:46]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah.
- [88:46]
Dr. Michael West
That she's sort of like, well, you don't.
- [88:47]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
You.
- [88:48]
Dr. Michael West
You still remember this. So I. You're right. I hadn't quite thought of her as that sarcastic. But now I'm hearing it a lot more, which totally fine with. Well, it's an interesting thought because in some ways, she's. She's acting like a confessor with a penitent who's sort of having trouble saying the sins. And I guess I'm not a cleric who's hearing confessions. I'm not sure this is standard practice in the Western church now, but it is an interesting mode of kind of spiritual interrogation that he gets here.
- [89:22]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
I think probably one of the best parallels actually, is God accusing Job. Many of those lines from God in Job are sarcastic, and I know people don't. Whatever you want to say. Sometimes people always see sarcastic as a pejorative. Whatever word you want to use. God is definitely asking Job questions that God already knows the answer to and knows that there's no way Job can actually answer these things. Right. Where were you when the foundations of the earth were laid? Where, you know, where do I store the winds? You know, can you tame the leviathan? You know, X, Y, and Z. So I actually think this parallels that. And they keep playing this out, kind of what she's already accused him of. So. But 24, she says, like, in your desire for me, which led you toward the love of good, there's nothing one may long for after that. What ditches crossed your path? What chains did you ever find which made you shed all hope of moving forward? So you had it, right? You had me. I was the icon. I pointed towards God. Why did you fail here? What ditches? What can you possibly blame for why you did this? It's interesting, he says, At 34, those things at hand with their fake pleasures turned away my steps as soon as your face was hidden from me. So he's admitting this, but now we're starting to see these confessions. And it's interesting that down at 48, she actually tells him, which he already kind of has. They're ruminating back and forth because I think they're trying to dig this out of Dante the pilgrim, she said she actually explains to him how this should have worked. Never did art or nature present to you delight quite like the beautiest form in which I was enclosed, though now it's scattered in the earth. She goes on to say, you shouldn't have let your wings become so heavy and thus expose yourself to other shots, some new girl or other novelty or fleeting joy. So she was the most beautiful thing he had, her form, who she was, because, remember, he barely knew her. It's not like this is like they're not talking about their friendship. She was beautiful. This is another thing that we just aren't. Aren't comfortable with. But this is, again, in a lot of ways, this is the beginning of Deotima's ladder of love. The first thing that awakens the erotic appetite in the soul is the beauty of the beloved. Then you kind of figure out, you know, the beauty of the soul, but it's the outside that catches the attention. She says, see, I'm the most beautiful thing you had ever, and it still did not lend you. You went after lesser goods. And I think one thing too here that's interesting is that there's different ways to read this. But I. You know, I. I think that when she talks about some new girl or some other girl, she mentions this a few times. What she is referencing there is like she's an analog for this beauty, this good, that pointed him to God. And so she paints this almost as a somewhat adulterous scene in which, like, Dante gives his heart to other goods, other girls. Right. I don't think she's. I've seen this sometimes, and I don't think it's right. I don't think she's. She's not talking about Gemma. She's not talking about his wife. She's not talking about.
- [92:23]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah, I don't think so either. It doesn't make any sense.
- [92:25]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, no, she's talking about the fact that she showed him God and he turned away then to these other forms, these other beauties that pointed him towards other things. And so there's this. And that makes sense, right? Because, you know, the. The erotic relation is the number one relation that God uses to explain his love for us. The entire Old Testament is contextualized as husband and wife. And so idolatry is always presented poetically as adultery. And so here he is, like, going after these other forms. Oh, by the way, the sarcasm, like, incredibly thick. 67. Since you feel sorrow as you listen, lift up your beard when looking, you feel more pain. And she talks about his beard down at 75 too. So you actually mentioned this earlier. He's acting like a child. He turned to Virgil, like his mama. He has this, like, thing. And so she's reminding. He's. He is weeping and crying like a child. And she's reminding him, by the way, you're an adult. Yeah, she is not letting go. I mean, she has her hooks in, and she is not letting go on this. But he makes it the next step. I think it's like 76. You see it? And as my face began to rise to look. So he's admitted his sins, he's admitted what he did, and he gets to see. And my bright eyes, no longer certain of anything, now look at Beatrice, whose gaze was on the beast. That which alone is the one with the double nature. And so this is, I think, what you were mentioning earlier, that this is where we get. You see that he is looking at her, which is wisdom. And wisdom is looking at the griffin, which is Christ.
- [94:05]
Dr. Michael West
Yeah, this is like the next all. Paradiso is not all, but there's a lot of, like, looking. Looking at people who are looking at something else sort of like throughout the rest of the way. And this is, I think, the. The first time it happens with Beatrice. So why is it that when he looks at her, looking at the griffin, that's when he finally pulls the nettle of remorse at 85. Like that. That something about that, like, completes. It's not somebody that he, like, feels bad and feels like a shameful child that somehow doesn't seem to complete the. The contrition or remorse that he seems to need.
- [94:46]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Okay, so with the griffin, my answer to that would be is that in that moment, he allows Beatrice to play the role that she was supposed to play. So look, he's looking at her, and she's looking at Christ, and he's allowing that. And he knows this, which means he's seeing how this whole thing works. And so I think in that moment, he's allowing her to finally lead him to Christ, right to God, to beauty itself. And in that moment, like around 87, he becomes contrite. So then he goes like. He gets the river finally, which is the forgiveness of. The forgiveness of sins, the release of these things. I would say that he's removed from the attachment of sin. It's interesting that he drinks the water, which shows that there's an interior. There's an interior element also, that he's.
- [95:35]
Dr. Michael West
He's. He's forced to. To swallow it. That there is a kind of, you know, like, real deal sort of violence. Like, there's a. You know, it's clearly baptismal here. There's also. It's another river crossing, just like we had back in hell. So we're sort of like, doing the same sort of thing again, right? In a new way.
- [95:55]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, I think it. I think it shows that he's. Again. Yeah. And then again, it's Matilda that drag. It's not Beatrice, it's Matilda that then drags him out onto the water. Just beautiful. I. I just. I just love all this imagery.
- [96:09]
Dr. Michael West
Let's finish with the beast. Smash with the beast.
- [96:12]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Okay, go for it.
- [96:13]
Dr. Michael West
So at like, 120, this is just. It's a beautiful kind of contemplative moment where he finally seems to look. And he says, so he's looking at Beatrice. And he says, even as the sun in a mirror, not otherwise. The twofold beast shone forth in them. So in Beatrice's eyes, now with the one. Now with its other nature. I just find it a very beautiful image that. That The. The. The sort of mystery of Christ as having two persons in. In one nature. He doesn't really. You can't. He isn't explaining it. He's just giving you an image of a griffin. But he just says, I. I saw it, and I saw it somehow in someone else's eyes again. I think I said at the beginning, Deacon, that I was. I love the way for Dante, there's this sense of, like, community and other people, and I guess this is me. One of the ways in which you get it is that he doesn't look at the griffin. He looks at someone else looking. And there's something about that experience that draws him where he needs to go. And I guess that's my. That's my Dante. And then they dance at 1:32. I love that people start dancing again.
- [97:28]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Yeah, that's beautiful. Okay, I have to run because I have to go play lawyer again and go back to my day job. Even though I really enjoy discussing beauty
- [97:37]
Dr. Michael West
with you, I have to send emails after this, too.
- [97:40]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Okay, wonderful. Really appreciate our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Remind us where people can find more about you and your work.
- [97:47]
Dr. Michael West
Type in Michael West, University of Dallas into Google.
- [97:51]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
Okay, wonderful. Thank you.
- [97:53]
Dr. Michael West
Find everything about our university and myself as well.
- [97:57]
Deacon Hurston Garlic
No? Very good. All right, everyone, go check us out on Facebook, YouTube X and Patreon as well. And next week we will finish the purgatorio, our last two Cantos with Joshua Charles and Dr. Frank Grabowski. So we'll see you next week. Thank you.